nick dot blog

I gave a talk last weekend at the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community Meetup with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Mauritius Chapter. The talk was about creating developer portals using Backstage, how we are using it at MCB and some of the challenges we’ve had to overcome along the way.

Here are the slides from the presentation: Building Developer Portals with Backstage

I’ve also created a video for one of the demos on how to create a custom plugin to provision Azure DevOps Projects.

We are currently using a proprietary ETL tool. Whilst it is very capable, skills and support in the market are scarce. I wanted to see what Open Source alternatives are available and see if they could be used to simplify some of our ETL flows. Read more

We've just completed a proof of concept on Backstage - an Internal Developer Portal from Spotify. Here's what we learned... Read more

Some tips on deploying Backstage on Openshift. Read more

How to add custom filters to the Camunda Tasklist. Read more

I wanted to see if I could leverage the Form.io Form Renderer from within a Camunda Embedded Form. Turns out you can... Read more

Nothing brings out the blogger in me like spending a couple of days wrestling with a problem. This weeks' challenge has been configuring OAuth 2 User Assertion on the Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC). It's taken a couple of days of trial and error but it's finally working! So in the hope of saving future generations some time and frustration here's how it's done... Read more

In this post I'm discussing how to test software designs using ArchUnit as well as why you might want to in the first place. Read more

In Enterprise Integration the Idempotent Receiver Pattern ensures that regardless of how many times a message is received the same result is produced. I wanted to see how Camel implements this pattern and explore some of the edge cases. Read more

I learned a bit of Python this week. Mostly though I felt like I was just figuring out how to translate between Java or C# to the Python equivalent. It was really interesting to see how certain concepts play out across the languages. It was a lot of fun and I wanted to take it a little further. I'm going to do this by implementing some of the TDD Katas I've been using for Java and C# into Python. First up Mars Rover... Read more